Orion, Powered by NSULATE

The World’s First GPU-accelerated Storage Appliance that Goes Beyond RAID.

In collaboration with Nyriad, Advanced HPC is proud to announce the commercial availability of Orion, the world’s first GPU-accelerated storage appliance.

Making its formal debut at the 2018 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (i.e., GTC18), Orion supports over 100 HDDs in a 4U rack space without having to rely upon an external host unit. It utilizes Nyriad’s NSULATE software – a GPU-accelerated alternative to RAID designed for hyperscale storage, big data and high performance computing. Orion couples the processing power of an NVIDIA Tesla P4 GPU with 64GB of NVDIMMs, all housed in a Thunder SX FA100 chassis.

Orion utilizes the GPU to make up to 100 storage devices act as a single, high-performance block device with enterprise grade data integrity and resilience. By using the GPU as a storage controller, it brings a new level of intelligence to data storage that spurs better data resilience and improved comparative performance.

Since the NSULATE technology powering Orion presents as a Linux block device, it is compatible with a broad range of file systems, including the highly reliable, readily scalable BeeGFS parallel file system that is winning enterprise converts the world over. As the number one reseller of BeeGFS in the U.S., Advanced HPC is the market-leading architect of customized BeeGFS solutions. Contact us to learn how we can build the ideal Orion-BeeGFS configuration for you.

Why NSULATE?

While RAID supports only two (2) failures before data is lost, NSULATE supports array configurations beyond traditional RAID5 and RAID6 as well as enables real-time hyperscale erasure coding up to 255 parity.

NSULATE utilizes modern GPUs to accelerate storage, enabling parity calculations, cryptographic checksums and storage addressing to all take place on the same general purpose storage controller

Using a GPU for software-defined storage enables the calculation of modern storage resilience and data protection to be performed orders of magnitude faster than on a traditional CPU. This is key for maintaining data locality and ensuring data integrity expected for enterprise high performance applications.

NSULATE supports arbitrary levels of parity well beyond 100 devices (up to 255), enabling any configuration of data and parity devices within a single Orion storage unit. We recommend a 90:10 configuration to support resilience beyond a typical RAID60 with less than half the overhead for parity.

Rectify Data Errors in Real Time

To directly address the mission-critical needs of today’s enterprise that cannot afford downtime, Orion powered by NSULATE performs (SHA-2 or SHA-3) cryptographic checksums and detects – and rectifies – bit levels data errors in real-time. No data loss. No data corruption. And a significant reduction of the probability of downtime.

Unlike a typical RAID controller, these checksums are performed in-line with parity calculations on the GPU, meaning that any data corruption or checksum failure can be immediately repaired by recovering the corrupt data from parity, like it would a missing drive

Given that GPUs can solve the complex system of equations needed to rebuild missing data in real-time, they are able to run degraded arrays at nearly full speed even when shouldering missing drives.

Peak Efficiency

Because Orion produces higher mathematical resiliency than RAID, it allows users to secure more storage capacity compared to RAID and reduce the number of drives required to reach a storage target

Orion can provide substantial cost savings by significantly reducing, or altogether eliminating, the need for hardware mirroring. To achieve resilience beyond three devices in a RAID60, it is common for administrators to mirror across two identical RAID60 spans. NSULATE’s support for high-parity makes mirroring unnecessary for many use cases

By using a GPU instead of a specialized chip for storage, it can be utilized for processing data stored on the array with high efficiency, reducing power consumption by significantly lowering the amount of data moved over the network for processing.

To Get More Information . . .

Contact Advanced HPC to learn why Orion is the next-gen storage solution for which you have been searching. Our sales engineers are not only eager to answer all your questions and further elaborate on Orion’s capabilities, but they can also arrange for a commercial trial so you can see its remarkable performance first hand. Contact us today! (Simply complete an Inquiry Form on our website or click the link below.)

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